Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [78]
It was a lucky shot. The extinguisher struck the creature full in the face and caught it off balance. The hybrid fell backwards, arms spread out like a high diver. It looked almost graceful until it hit the steps about half way down, and then it became a spinning mass of arms and legs and thrashing Xaranti limbs. Its head met the floor at the bottom of the staircase with a sickening thump and a halo of brown fluid began to form around it. Turlough didn’t hang around.
He turned and lurched up the rest of the stairs.
He reached the fifth floor without further incident and hurried along the landing to his room. He fumbled the keys out of his pocket and pushed the largest into the lock. It wasn’t until he was in his room with the door locked behind him that he began to shake with reaction. Trying to ignore it, he shoved his bed against the door, then piled every item of furniture in the room on top of it. At last, for want of a better weapon, he grabbed a coat hanger from the wardrobe and sat in the corner of the room, facing the barricaded door.
Wishing desperately that he could make himself invisible, he pressed himself as far back into the corner as he could and drew his knees up under his chin.
‘You see now?’ the Brigadier said.
Benton nodded. ‘Yes.’
The Brigadier put his hand on Benton’s shoulder. Benton winced as the itching beneath his skin intensified. A wave of sensation that was part pleasure, part pain rippled through his body.
Benton could no longer understand why he had allowed the human, Yates, to take the Doctor away. He only wished he had had his eyes opened in time to prevent it. Human motivation seemed so petty, so pointless, so alien to him now.
He looked around and saw soldiers and hybrids standing shoulder to shoulder, united in a common cause. It felt good.
It felt right. And although for the moment he was still aware of who he was, still retained his human identity, he understood and embraced the fact that individuality was no longer important, that it was a human characteristic, divisive and inefficient. Soon there would be no need for it, would no longer even be any further need for speech. For the time being, though, it would remain a useful marshalling device.
‘Let’s move out,’ Benton shouted, and moving across to the nearest army vehicle he slid behind the wheel.
Obediently everyone followed suit, clambering up into the vehicles, squeezing themselves in as tightly as they could.
When the vehicles were full to bursting point, Benton started the engine of his jeep and they all filed out, a grotesque slow-moving convoy. There was no need to discuss a plan of attack, no need to issue orders; they were all working as one now, all knew exactly what they had to do. Their immediate objective was clear to them all. They would search tirelessly until they had recovered the Doctor.
At that moment the Doctor was several miles away, still unconscious in the back of a UNIT truck. Tegan was crouched beside him, clinging for dear life to truck’s metal framework. She felt not unlike a gazelle being driven through a lion enclosure. At least she had the advantage of being armed, she reminded herself, clutching Mike Yates’s Colt .45
in her free hand - though in truth the gun made her feel more nervous than secure.
The journey had been perilous to say the least, but, as they had travelled north, the amount of death and devastation they had seen around them had steadily decreased. They had been pursued frequently by hybrids, and had even been ambushed at one point, a trio of the creatures dropping down on to the truck from above as they had negotiated one of the narrow residential streets that climbed away from the seafront and out of the town centre. One of them had landed on the roof of the driver’s cab, the legs that had sprouted from its back clacking against the windscreen like long, jointed, sticks; another had